Kam Mak,
My Chinatown: One Year in Poems.
HarperCollins, 2002

This book offers fifteen glimpses, through paired poems and paintings, of the year in which the narrator, a boy from Hong Kong, becomes accustomed to life in Chinatown. Chinatown alone, not New York City as a whole, must vie with Hong Kong for the narrator’s affection; in his mind, the city outside Chinatown is linked to school, "where the English words / taste like metal in my mouth." His Chinatown, in contrast, is part big city and part insular community, where he can stand undisturbed in a specialty shop and stare at the paper birds and dragons, visit with a shoemaker at work, or buy from a cart enough Chinese food to spoil his appetite for dinner.

Though each glimpse of Chinatown will fascinate readers, the homesick boy finds his early experiences disappointing. The sequence of poems opens as a New Year’s celebration ends dismally for him; he wades alone through red scraps of paper, fails to come up with a firecracker, and notes that the color red must mean "someone else’s luck this year." Later, when the street carts stock kumquats, he sees "wooden crates packed full of suns," but his pleasure is mitigated: his mother can’t pickle them the way his grandmother, still in Hong Kong, always did. Throughout, his sense of loss makes all the more touching the resilient openness of his observations. By the end, he’s adequately enamored with his new neighborhood to anticipate recurring celebrations, even projecting a time when he might race on a dragon boat rather than watch from a distance. We’re not surprised at the development: through his attention, we’ve seen Chinatown’s charms. All the same, when he speaks of "home" he still means Hong Kong.

Through both poems and paintings, the narrator is a coherent, recognizable character. The boy interacts with his sister, a young friend, a few animals, and a variety of adults, but his spirit, we sense, is independent. As his mother selects a live carp from a tank, the boy notes, "He waves his tail gently / and looks straight at me." The painting shows the fish in question unmistakably meeting the viewer’s gaze. That night, the boy pretends to be ill in order to avoid meeting the carp again at the dinner table. Later, he’s drawn to meet the eye of another animal, this time a tic-tac-toe-playing hen to whom he doesn’t mind losing for the joy of watching her eat her pay in chicken feed.

An uncluttered design allows the straightforward poems and realistic paintings to shine. In each spread, the painting is on one page and the poem faces, set against a clean white background. Single off-white words announce the progression of the season. This simplicity will be helpful to young readers and those for whom English is not a first language.

Jessica Roeder
Spring 2002